In World War I, British-officer Michael Andrews is captured by a band of Kurdish raiders on the Eastern Front, and is rescued by a man calling himself John Stevenson, although he refuses to tell his name to Andrews. The two men form a strange friendship, and help save an entire Kurdish village from a massacre and also avert a surprise attack on the British army-unit stationed there. Andrews suffers a wounded leg and is sent to the British military-hospital in Cairo. He falls in love with a nurse, Rosemary Haydon, and she with him, but she is married although she has not seen nor heard from her husband in over three years. It is at this point that the man who saved Andrews' life turns up to claim his wife, who is Rosemary. The latter bids adieu to Andrews who does not know that the man he considers his best friend is also the husband of the woman he loves. But, by pure coincidence and chance, both Andrews and Rosemary's husband come face-to-face again in a remote garrison that is under an attack that appears to have the possibility of no survivors among the fort defenders. During WW1, the destinies of British officers Michael Andrews and John Stevenson seem intertwined on the battle front as much as on a more personal level. This is a pretty bog-standard tale, and you've almost certainly seen it done before. Two men who fall in love with the same woman during wartime. Claude Rains plays the stodgy but noble-minded husband while Cary Grant is the suave outsider. Yadda, yadda, yadda.<br/><br/>What is absolutely WONDERFUL about this movie is that the studio tried to save money by recycling scenes from an earlier, silent version of the same (?) film. On paper it made a sort of sense, the earlier film had enjoyed a bigger budget with lots of extras and so on. Unfortunately no-one took into account the film stock and frames per second differences between the two films.<br/><br/>So there you are, watching what seems like a low-budget pot boiler. Suddenly you're thrust into a blurry, gritty shot of hundreds of natives moving VERY quickly and jerkily for a couple of seconds. And then we're back to normal tempos and film stock.<br/><br/>OK, it's not much to write home about but it's quite a fun effect. The Last Outpost finds Cary Grant and Claude Rains as British Army officers in that backwater theater of World War I, Mesopotamia. Today we know it as Iraq.<br/><br/>It's fascinating how things change, in this film it's the Kurds who are the nasty villains, working on behalf of the Ottoman Empire and facing the British here. When we meet Cary Grant as the film opens, he's being dragged into camp as a prisoner.<br/><br/>But the guy who dragged him in is Claude Rains in a Turkish army uniform. But wait, it turns out he's a spy working for British Intelligence and he frees Grant and also saves an Armenian tribe from being massacred.<br/><br/>While convalescing in hospital Grant falls for his beautiful nurse Gertrude Michael. She kind of likes him, but she's slightly married though it was a quickie romance that didn't really take. Guess who she's married to? <br/><br/>A lot of nice action here makes up for just another wartime triangle. But Claude Rains is such a superb actor, that man could make any kind of drivel look good.
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295 weeks ago